Conference takeaways – customer engagement in the social age

Conference takeaways – customer engagement in the social age

Business Systems attracted over 280 delegates to the 10th annual Improving Performance conference last November which focused on the need for real time customer engagement in the social age.

Customer Service Fact!Some topical areas covered included; ‘the top 2011 call centre issues’ presented by Call Centre Helper Editor, Jonty Pearce who pointed out that it typically takes 24 hours for call centres to respond to an email enquiry. Subsequently more and more customers are turning to internet chat and other forms of social communication to achieve faster response rates with more immediate agent engagement.

Being SocialBT’s Head of Social Media Innovation, Bian Salins reinforced using social media as a service channel. Commenting that BT noticed their customer needs were changing, they took action and listened. Their research highlighted that via social channels, 83% of customers were saying “I buy more from companies that make it easier for me to do business with them.” By implementing a social strategy and making contact simpler, BT demonstrated increased loyalty of their customers over time.

Multichannel issuesCourtesy of Gerry Brown at Strativity Group delegates also gained insights into designing multichannel customer experience strategies. One of the biggest issues identified was that “34% of companies say they have difficulty unifying different sources of data across multiple channels” (eConsultancy survey). In some cases during live calls, agents can be dealing with data from across at least five different systems. Technology suppliers are increasingly aware of this and solutions like NICE’s Real Time Process Optimisation which takes data from multiple applications and processes it to help agents make executive decisions during calls, are cropping up to try and address this.